


Who Walks By Night

by emilyenrose



Category: Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones, Magids Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 03:33:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyenrose/pseuds/emilyenrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ways of the worlds hold many secrets. (Or, the one where Nick meets Jamie.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Walks By Night

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://betony.dreamwidth.org/1815.html?thread=14359#cmt14359).

Nick liked magic. He liked doing it, he liked the way it started to make him feel sizzly and strong inside after a while, but even more than that he liked thinking about it. Thinking about magic required you to turn your mind around in interesting ways, upside down and back to front and rippling sideways from the ways most people thought. Sometimes it required you to think two different ways at once, or else as soon as you got the hang of one angle of thinking it became absolutely necessary to do it backwards. Nick had always been lazy, and thinking about magic--especially the way Romanov wanted him to do it--was hard work, and Grundo was better at it. Nick resented Grundo for being better at it. But soon he realised it was also a kind of short cut. He'd always liked games; learning magic was like learning cheat codes for the entire universe.  
  
The thing that Nick liked most about magic, though, was the secrets. It was why he'd wanted to be a Magid; he liked secrets, liked teasing them out of things and unknotting them and spreading them out for looking at. If magic was the cheat codes then secrets were the easter eggs. The Magids knew loads of secrets. But it became obvious after a while that Romanov knew just as many, if not all the same ones. It wasn't easy to get them out of him. He said you had to learn them for yourself or they didn't mean the right things. But Nick suspected that Romanov just liked secrets too and understood the most important thing about them, which was that they shouldn't be shared too easily.   
  
He agreed to trade a secret to Nick in return for the story of Babylon, which was the only Magid secret Nick knew. "Hmm," he said when Nick was done telling it. "Interesting.  _Interesting_. A piece of the spiritus mundi, maybe. A very old piece, though, maybe the oldest I've ever heard of. I wonder which came first, the city of Babylon or the idea of Babylon?"  
  
Nick knew that the spiritus mundi was one of the theories about how magic worked and where it came from. It was supposed to be a kind of joining together of all the stories and dreams and ideas in the universe. Romanov had been interested in it lately. But he was obviously bringing it up as a distraction. "Remember you promised me a secret in return," he said.  
  
"Right," said Romanov, and made a face that meant he was both annoyed and pleased with Nick for not letting him get away with it. "Here's your price, then. The archons and their pet wizards aren't the only ones ever to think of messing about with Fate. And the way Time works between the worlds is more complicated than anyone really understands." He thought for a moment and added, "Except me."  
  
"That's the secret?" said Nick, disappointed.  
  
"No, that's everything you need to find the secret."  
  
"I told you all about Babylon!"  
  
"No, you only told me what you knew," Romanov said. "I'm pretty sure there's much more to it than that. I'm going to find it out. Good luck working out yours."  
  
Nick was furious. He went down to the shore in a black mood and kicked at the white sand. Then he used some magic to make the sand into stone--that was easy, sand sort of wanted to be stone anyway--and then threw it into the water for a big satisfying splash. He was still angry, though, and he still didn't understand Romanov's secret. He could have asked Grundo for help, or even gone to Roddy or Maree, but then he would have to share it, and secrets weren't supposed to be given away like that.  
  
It was while he was standing on the shore scowling out at the tropical blue waves that a boy came walking quickly down one of the paths between the worlds. He was a scrawny underfed looking kid, a bit younger than Nick, but he walked with the sort of effortless confidence that only Romanov and other people who spent a lot of time on the dark paths had. He jumped down onto the island beside Nick, sniffed the warm salt air, and wrinkled his nose.  
  
Nick was very surprised. Romanov's island was fenced with protections and hard to find, let alone get onto. "What world did you come from?" he said. He squinted at the path the boy had come along. It was a thin wavery one; Nick wouldn't have wanted to go that way himself.  
  
The boy looked snotty and said, "I don't come from anywhere."  
  
"How on earth did you get here?"  
  
"Along the Bounds," said the boy. "You saw me, didn't you?"  
  
"But no one should be able to get here," Nick said.   
  
The boy ignored him. He looked around, taking in the patchworkness of Romanov's island. Nick realised he looked very tired, and started to get curious. He made an effort to shake himself into something resembling a friendly mood. "If you've been out there a long time you should rest for a bit. I can get you something to eat," he offered.  
  
"This isn't a proper world," said the boy. "It's only here because someone decided to invent a Home, isn't it?"  
  
"It's--"  
  
"I've seen a place like this before," the boy said. "Where--where someone special lived. I don't need to come here."  
  
"Who are you?" said Nick.  
  
But the boy didn't answer him. He just looked around again, sadly, and shook his head. Then he set off across the sand until he crossed one of the patchwork lines into a a place where a different bit of beach bordered a different, colder, darker sea. He walked straight into the waves and then up, back onto the dark paths. "Wait!" said Nick before he could disappear from Romanov's island altogether.  
  
"What?" said the boy.   
  
"That bit of the island's twenty years in the past," Nick said. "The owner here does weird things with time. If you go that way you'll never get where you're going."  
  
"I'm not going anywhere," the boy said, and then he walked off into the dark, along another path Nick didn't know, and Nick felt--in the very grim and certain way that Romanov called Kenning--that it would be a bad idea to follow him.   
  
It was years before he worked out that the things Romanov had told him and the boy who wasn't going anywhere were part of the same secret. It was a secret with a lot of names, though the name Romanov used for it was the Anchorite. Nick learned eventually that this was both because an anchorite was someone who had nothing to do with the world and because the boy who wasn't going anywhere functioned as a kind of anchor for the whole universe. Some careful prodding of Maree revealed that the Magids knew the secret too, and called it the Lost Sailor. "The Sailor is a metaphor, though, Nick," said Maree. "There have been lots of real echoes, Odysseus and things, but imagine if someone could  _really_  never get home, forever. I don't think the Upper Room would let that happen. Their Intentions are complicated but not evil."  
  
"If the whole point of him was to be not part of any world, though," said Nick, "would the Upper Room necessarily know about him? Their area is the worlds, right?"  
  
Maree frowned. "That's a secret, Nick," she said, which Nick took to mean that he'd guessed right.  
  
He never met the boy from the dark paths again. He often thought that if he did, he'd say something. A thank you, at least.


End file.
